Using phenomenology: researching lived experience

I am a part-time PhD student using phenomenology as a research paradigm to explore the experiences of nurses who mentor students in practice. Phenomenology raises many challenges to the collection and handling of research data. In particular, what it is possible to know about other people's experiences is bound up with philosophical theory that needs to be interpreted by the researcher in order to make sense of the lifeworld being studied.

Tuesday, 12 October 2010

Heidegger: out of the fog

Reading Heidegger does't plunge me into fog in quite the same way as it used to. There must be some understanding of phenomenology percolating its way into me. I'm thinking of using these two extracts to head up my chapter on using phenomenology in my research:

The question of the meaning of Being is the most universal and the emptiest of questions, but at the same time it is possible to individualize it very precisely for any particular Dasein. If we are to arrive at the basic concept of ‘Being’, and to outline the ontological conceptions which it requires and the variations which it necessarily undergoes, we need a clue which is concrete. (Heidegger, 1962: 63)

Thus, to give a phenomenological description of the ‘world’ will mean to exhibit the Being of those entities which are present-at-hand within the world, and to fix it in concepts which are categorical. (Heidegger, 1962: 91)